Thursday, November 13, 2008

Just a reminder

"Faced with the long conflict there and in Iraq, the US military has realised that sheer firepower is not enough. The Pentagon has discovered the "human terrain" or what General David Petraeus calls the "cultural terrain" and has been recruiting anthropologists and social scientists to map it and advise commanders on local social networks.
...
Objections to the HTS programme range from the inherent secrecy of mission-oriented research to, as eminent anthropologist Marshall Sahlins observes, "manipulating local culture, imposing [our government's objectives] on them, transforming anthropologists into spies, and putting people you work with [in the locale] at risk". Last November, the executive board of the American Anthropological Association (AAA) formally discouraged its members from taking part in HTS programmes."

I've blogged about this before but a reminder can't hurt.

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